A resist film coated mask blank being a base of an exposure mask for use in semiconductor manufacturing has been known. In recent years, in the mask blank of this type, necessity for a chemically amplified resist having high resolution has been gradually increasing following miniaturization and complexity of circuit patterns formed on a semiconductor.
The chemically amplified resist is poor in sensitivity stability after resist coating as compared with other resists and is subjected to occurrence of a change in resist sensitivity according to an elapsed time from the resist coating to a writing process or a storage environment after the resist coating. Therefore, a mask manufacturing department (mask maker, device maker, or the like), serving to manufacture exposure masks, performs exposure amount correction or the like based on the experimental rule to thereby suppress CD (critical dimension:minimum size) degradation or variation.
Further, in recent years, it has been proposed to provide various information to a mask manufacturing department in order to improve the yield of exposure masks or the like (see Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication (JP-A) No. 2002-328463 (Patent Document 1) and Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication (JP-A) No. 2003-149793 (Patent Document 2)). For example, in Patent Document 2, when providing mask blanks to a mask manufacturing department from a blank manufacturing department (blank maker or the like), defect information of those mask blanks is provided. In this manner, in the mask manufacturing department, it becomes possible to improve the yield of exposure masks by selecting proper mask blanks based on the defect information and pattern data.